. Down below iron floors stokers and trimmers were sweating,
engineers were watching and nursing and feeding the great steel
bondagers that drove us along; but how many of the light-hearted
passengers ever thought of them? They were out of sight and mind, hidden
away in their stifling holes, where in their relation to us they
completed the satire of our miniature society.

I might give you a dozen pictures of our life, and yet mislead you as to
its uncommonness; it was really commonplace life in strange and
unfamiliar circumstances. Here is an example. At the first concert it
was noticed, not without surprise, that the Captain's name was down for
a song. Now for days the Captain had tramped alone up and down the
deck--a large man, with a heavy face and drooping eye, and a head set
forward on the shoulders by reason of long hours of staring into the
sea dust; a man past middle-age, silent and (as we thought) surly.
Therefore something like a sensation was produced when it was announced
that the Captain would sing "Mary." I think I see and hear it now. The
saloon filled with people; the windows framing faces of deck hands and
firemen, with a background of moving blue; the heavy central figure, the
kindly (we saw that now) Scotch face; the worn voice, unused to
sustained utterance, gasping for breath in the middle of a line, and
sometimes failing to be ready in time ("I lost the run of it," he
explained to us in the middle of a temporary breakdown); the quaint
simplicity of the words, "Kind, kind and gentle is she, kind is ma
Ma-ary"; the thunder of applause that greeted the close; the immediate
and unassailable popularity of the Captain. If I have described it as I
saw it, you will understand why I shall always like to remember that
scene. Here is another glimpse.

On a Sunday, when the church bells at home were jangling and the streets
were (for a guess) streaming with rain and mud, it was Sunday with us
also, three thousand miles away. The sun was lighting the lazy sea until
it shone like a big blue diamond, the whales were spouting, the
porpoises plunging and blowing, and here and there a shark lay basking
near the surface with a wicked, wriggling, black fin exposed. It was
very hot and still; the great sea people seemed to be revelling in some
sort of Sabbath of their own, and the waters lay quiet and shining under
the eye of Heaven. Here and there a drove of small flying-fishes rose
and skimmed over the surface like